Night Thoughts Of The Solo Sleeper

(A trip down memory lane here.  This was one of the earliest pieces I wrote which purely had 'performance' rather than page in mind, and stayed in the set for many years afterwards before I decided to retire it off.  

The structure of it was always deemed to be odd and attracted negative comments from some audience members, so I kept it in as an act of personal faith rather than anything else. The idea behind the delivery was to gradually speed it up to almost - but not quite - an incomprehensible pace for the found pieces of material in the middle as a manic peak, then tail off again around stanza 10.  Given that the found segments consisted of newspaper articles and headlines, the concept was always that you should just accept the flashes of information without worrying hugely about what they were, in the same manner that blips of half-heard or half-seen adverts would penetrate your subconscious.  

It was disliked by some for that very reason, with one person - who happened to be an English Teacher, as she was only too fond of reminding me twice - telling me "Poems should never be delivered in that way".  Them's the rules, apparently.  Even though they aren't.  Performance poets like Miles Champion and Mike Diss were deliberately delivering work in this way for most of the eighties and the nineties, so the idea that you can't do this onstage is a relatively recent one now that concerns about the accessibility of live performances have started to move to the top of people's agendas. Eventually those concerns will ebb away again, 'name' stage poets will get more experimental with their work in either this way or other ways, and as to whether I'll start performing this again, no, it's unlikely.  It feels too much like something a man in his mid-twenties would write.  But here it is again anyway).

1.

and then it all comes back to me,

when I walk through

damp busy streets

and the puddles ripple

with the interruption of passing heels,

and the image of two strangers

breaks totally,

a shimmer of street lights

zagged in a liquid storm.

A year feels inaccurate.

It feels like yesterday

you slammed the door.

2.

and he realised he

might become one of the

lost men who all date

teenage girls and dream of

having a beautiful woman

who timidly thinks she’s ugly.

She hides shaking in wardrobes

while they fantasise about

her shape, and keep onlookers

from their door.

All photographers flashes

will bleach out

the negative delusions,

she’ll realise the truth,

the last he’ll see of her

before she leaves is

her shadow on the wall,

caught in one final

global media blink.

3.

and she remembers

those inebriated nights

where it didn’t matter.

Nails in her feet

couldn’t be felt then.

She’d touch them on the bare

floorboards heading to her room

staggering on his arm,

but they wouldn’t hurt.

Nor would he.

4.

and did she have any

“date me” trousers left to wear?

5.

“and is anyone really shocked by

celebrities who put their fingers

down their throats in bar toilets

anymore?  I mean, I do it, all

my friends do it, it’s the

secret of having a great time,

pulling a man and

looking grrreat”.

6.

and the smell of money

produces a sensation of a

free fall through zeroes,

in large numbers

preceded by a positive digit

their hollow centre is

empty for endless possibilities.

Everybody has a price.

7.

a family home can be

yours for only #300,000

8.

are you gorgeous?

Do you live in London?

Are you busy, single and successful?

The gorgeous club is

looking for people,

#200, meal included, meet

other gorgeous people,

and the good news is if you’re seriously

thinking about replying

to this ad, psychological

statistics prove that

chances are you already qualify!

9.

he read that the only common

popular fantasy between men and

women was thinking about sex with

complete strangers they see on trains.

Carriages are full of people

dreaming of rocking in

another motion, but

fearful of talking to a soul,

hating unknown members of

their own sex who

block the way.

10.

and we said goodbye,

but we didn’t mean it.

It exists in mind

like a fog of episodes of a

Dudley Moore light romantic

comedy, shot in grainy

Eastmancolor rather than Technicolour.

We carried on rewinding and

playing back again

for another year, on and off.

We forgot the unexpected fight scenes.

We had poor memories

for the not-so-homely dialogue.

The picture got even worse.

The tape snapped.

The only copy I’ve got left

exists in my head.

I’ve wiped lots of it on purpose.

I never learn.

I wonder where you are now.

11.

and you said there was no

romantic poetry left.

Capitalism Kills Love - Saturday 8th June

Hello. Firstly, I'd like to apologise for the complete lack of updates on this blog recently - it's not that I don't have work or ideas to share, it's more that I just completely lost track of time and didn't realise that May came and went without me uttering one single word. Sorry. I'd love to say it won't happen again, but it probably will at some point.

In lieu of a proper update as such, you should be aware that I'll be participating in the Morning Star/ Well Versed event "Capitalism Kills Love" as part of the Stoke Newington Literary Festival.  I'll be working in a DJ'ing capacity rather than a reading/ performing one along with Jody Porter (aka John the Revelator) but also on the bill will be Andy Meinke, Ian Parks, Influx Press, Tim Wells, Chip Grim, Joe Glenton, Kayo Chingonyi, Amy Acre, Abi Palmer, Matthew Hedley Stoppard, Emlyn Hugill, Rachael Allen, Chimene Suleyman and Sophia Blackwell.

The event will be taking place at the Mascara Bar in Stoke Newington at 72 Stamford Hill, London N16 6XS from 8:30pm on, but you should also be aware that audience members are also likely to be present to watch Phil Jupitus (Aka Porky The Poet) and Tim Wells do longer sets from 6pm at the very same venue.  This event has been organised in order to benefit Freedom Books following the recent arson attack on their store.

And that's not all... "Capitalism Kills Love" also offers a full line-up on Friday 7th June as well, so if you want you can make it along to both events.

Facebook information on the Morning Star event can be found here, whereas more info on the Freedom Books extravanganza can be found here.  If you can make both, rest assured I'll be hanging around somewhere in the audience or busy on the decks.  See you then.  

"Utter! Shite" - Saturday 27th April

Hello there.  You might be interested in the fact that I'm DJ'ing until late playing nothing but one hit wonders and novelty records at a night called "Utter Shite!" (hosted by Richard Tyrone Jones - pictured) on 27th April.  This is the first (and probably the last) time that the darkest, dingiest corners of my vinyl collection have been aired in public, so it's sure to be an event of sorts.


But if listening to flop Eurovision Song Contest entries, ditties from the "That's Life!" team and French seventies electronica isn't your bag, there will also be a wide range of  spoken word performers delivering three minutes and 33 seconds of pure nonsense and rubbish, among them Tim Wells, Lee Nelson, Dildo Dando, James Ross, Dan Simpson, Leanne Moden, Alan Wolfson, Alain English, Dave Bryant (that's me), Mark Dean Quinn, Michael MacIntyre (apparently) & Christian Ward (apparently).

It's £3.33 entrance at the Star of Kings, 126 York Way, London N1 0AX (nearest tube Kings Cross).  There's also a special prize bingo session.  The Facebook invite page is here.

For the sake of entertainment, and also in a possibly vain attempt to ensure that I still have some friends left at the end of the evening, I cannot guarantee that the contents of my DJ'ing will be 100% shite - there may be some actual beef in this particular value lasagne.  But I won't accept any requests for refunds.

And please don't ask me what poem I plan to read, but I suspect it may involve me digging back through some of my earliest notebooks.  This could be a complete non-treat.

Alter-egos

Way back on 23rd February (yes, I know, that was a long time ago now) I was invited to read a new poem inspired by the topic of alter-egos at a Broadcast event hosted by Roddy Lumsden and Sophia Blackwell.  I accepted the invitation despite actually having a deep-rooted fear of reading fresh, new poems in public.  Of course, I read "new" poems at open mics absolutely all the time, but these are almost always put through the mill first and are usually at least 3-4 months old by the time they're aired.  Not for me the reading aloud of the second draft written in biro on the back of a tatty old flyer - I'll usually hide the first draft in a drawer somewhere for a couple of months first, waiting until I can give what I've written an honest, non-emotional assessment, then begin the redrafting process.  I'm not a particularly spontaneous poet and most of what I do has to be hacked within an inch of its life before it works.

I penned three poems on alter-egos in the end.  One was so awful that all the editing and redrafting in the world wouldn't have given it legs.  Another, due to some horrible brainwrong, was almost a parody of a poem Roddy Lumsden had already written on the topic of alter-egos, and I only realised the glaring similarities the next day (clearly my subconscious was in full Christian Ward mode even if  my memory was acting up).  In the end, the third one had to do, which was somewhat unusually focused on the subject of summoning an alter-ego by chanting passages from the Myers-Briggs psychological co-ordinator into a bathroom mirror.  I'm aware that this was an unconventional subject and approach to the theme of the evening and it did cause me to do a jokey introduction on the night, as there was no other way around it.  It's not necessarily wholly original either - numerous avant-garde poets have had field-days with passages from psychological tests before now.  Despite this, it looked like it at least had a fighting chance, so I gave it another hasty redraft in the pub that afternoon and took it along to the Betsey Trotwood with me that evening to see what happened.

The night was actually one of the most enjoyable poetry evenings I've been to in awhile, incredibly laidback and relaxed in style and varied in tone.  The fact that each performer was only allowed to deliver one poem was occasionally frustrating as there were people I'd have liked to hear more from, but it was fascinating to hear the frequently unusual paths many readers took, and almost none of the work seemed that much below anyone's expected standards despite the restrictions of the chosen topic.  In the end, I found myself having to follow Raymond Antrobus which is always a bit of a bum deal as he's a mean live performer as well as a skilled writer (and has just been nominated for an award) but I held up well and the below was what the live audience heard.

I by no means think that this is an example of me writing my best work and I don't expect that I'll ever try to get it published - certainly not in this form, at least - but it's a rare example of me producing poetry to a tight deadline, which I was beginning to wonder if I'd ever be able to do again.  I've resisted the temptation to make further edits before posting it up here, as that would seem to be against the spirit of the whole venture.

[He is almost never late for appointments – YES/ NO]

[He gets pleasure from solitary walks – YES/ NO]

In moments of desperation

possession is preferable.

So I chanted as I wrote his

name in the bathroom

mirror, squeaking fingers

along spores of steam

before they were

sucked away to feed the

overgrown, feline playground of

East London gardens.

[He often prefers to read a book than go to a party – YES/ NO]

[Deadlines seem to be of relative, rather than absolute importance – YES/ NO]

And I write names of

other desirable entities

who would never play

knock down ginger on

doors of those who

promised too much,

everyday heroes with the

power to ignore the

irresolvable past.

[He knows how to put every minute of his time to good purpose – YES/ NO]

[He usually reacts first to a sudden event, such as the phone ringing, or an unexpected question – YES/ NO]

And I wipe in more

names, cocktail mix and

etch-a-sketch the wall

with Vamboo Rools,

clearing the condensation

until there are two mes,

siamesed by my index finger,

staring hollowly, blankly

back at my reloaded self.

[He tends to rely on experience rather than theoretical narratives – YES/ NO]

[He is more inclined to experiment than follow familiar approaches – YES/ NO]

On Not Giving Up Poetry

There are few things lazier than using somebody's else blog entry as a springboard for discussion, but in this case I can't resist.  Over here Alison Croggon talks in more depth about why she gave up writing poetry in favour of writing novels, and why she considers herself to be unlikely to return to the form.  It's a very honest and interesting read, and worth a click-through because she's candid in a way I doubt most practicing or aspiring poets would dare to be.  As a determined ex-poet she has nothing at all to lose by highlighting the traps, pitfalls and disadvantages of spending a lifetime engaging with the form, so her perspective is simultaneously refreshing and instantly recognisable.

At this point, I have to admit that her poetry is unfamiliar to me.  I could go away and attempt to read some, but I don't want to - if her work is of an extremely high quality I think I'd begin to feel exceptionally miserable and would probably try to begin a bullying campaign online to get her to reconsider.  For that reason alone, I'm going to ignore her literary work and focus on the main points her blog entry raises.

Firstly, I know precisely where she's coming from.  I consider stopping writing poetry several times a year, and have done so for quite some time now.  I don't know how common this is, but I would be extremely surprised if most poets, however successful they are, don't look around at the other opportunities available to them in life and feel cheated, banished to an outermost, Siberian art form.  Artists of all stripes are frequently loathe to talk about ambition, feeling it to be a vulgar irrelevance to their work, but the reality is that precious few intelligent human beings are capable of taking the higher road and living without it.  Most creative people are capable of living humble existences, but a humble existence without a great deal of praise, reassurance or acknowledgement is a hard task.  If you wave out to the world and hardly anyone waves back, the natural response is normally to assume that your attempts at communication and connection have proved of little consequence. Marginalised artforms make lonely artists lonelier still.  My wife (from a Catholic family in Canada) has referred to poets at some live events as being "like priests without a flock".

In terms of reaching an audience, poetry has come on in leaps and bounds since the mid-noughties when it hit an historical sales trough, but for all its attempts to connect with a wider public it remains a fringe art form.  No members of my family or any of my non-poetry reading friends are suddenly more curious about what I do just because the spoken word scene has enjoyed a few mentions in "The Metro".  To them, it still seems like a very odd thing to be preoccupied with.  The scene is thriving compared to what it was, but outside of cities even the biggest names are doomed to spend their evenings talking to small audiences in provincial libraries and bookshops.  Even where the audience is growing, there's a panic and desperation about the promotion, especially when the aim is to target the youth demographic.  Shouting in block capitals about the Nowness and Vitality of the circuit serves only to highlight how it still isn't really all that fashionable or popular - if it were, nobody would actually need telling that it's on the radar of everyone in the know.  People 'in the know' tend not to be secretive about their finds.  If poetry had truly arrived, there would at least be minor quarter page columns in the Sunday magazines talking about the latest exciting arrivals. As things stand, a special occasion like National Poetry Day barely warrants a mention in the media, and even BBC4 can never be bothered to broadcast anything for it.

So poetry can feel relatively thankless, and it's not an artform for people who crave fame or adulation. This in turn leads to the "knife fights in phone boxes" Croggon refers to - I've worked in many other spheres of the arts and media, and all suffer from incredibly vicious and petty rivalries, but few have felt so awkward and unfathomable to outsiders as the spats in the poetry world. If people aren't frothing at their mouths about a populist poet with big populist messages actually breaking through to a very small mainstream audience, then they're angry about poetry traitors.  These are usually people who are tied to certain sub-genres of poetry which either have their roots in areas which are too avant-garde or are too populist, or too academic or too middle class (delete depending on which side of the fence you sit on).  Each side remains convinced that the other is killing the artform or spreading false impressions and is therefore directly or indirectly depriving them of a living.  In a healthy artform, this kind of territorial dispute hardly ever emerges.  Heavy Metal bands and Reggae acts don't have knife-fights at dawn about who is bringing popular music to its knees.  Artists specialising in sculpture don't generally vandalise conceptual art installations.  But where there is little land to carve up, the battles will always be at their most fierce.

Sometimes being involved with poetry makes no sense.  Sometimes, when I think hard, I know that if I put as much effort into being a one-note novelty comedy act, or a novelty rock band, as I have the poetry, I'd be in with not necessarily a greater shot of success, but certainly more noticeable public displays of appreciation.  If, night in night out, I performed in a retro band doing nineties rave style cover versions of the "Bodyform" advert, I'd receive more pats on the back despite being a tool.  So whenever I do anything else at all, whether it's DJ'ing or writing short stories, people ask me if I'm giving poetry up.  I get incredulous and irritated and wonder why the subject is being brought up - I'm allowed to have more than one thing in my life, surely? - but, of course, it's obvious why they're asking.  People do leave poetry behind to write plays and novels.  The roll-call of poetry is littered with examples of people who eventually decided that they needed to move on (and some haven't done too badly as a result).  And I have to admit, I probably would leave if I had the choice.

There's just one problem.  I keep on writing new poems.  Sorry.  When I have ideas, that's the form they usually take.  And I'm glad that not everyone is like Croggon and more people suffer from my affliction - because while it's not 'the most important artform' or even 'the pinnacle of literary achievement' (that kind of talk is nonsense and just alienates people from the form, poetry is as populist or as high-minded as any individual wants it to be, but ooh, listen to me being territorial) it still has a huge impact on my life when it's done well.  And I don't necessarily hope I'll still be interested in it for some time to come, but I think I probably will be, and that's all there is to it.